Britain should give up its place on the International Monetary Fund to make way for a single European Union seat on the fund’s board, a leading economist has said.
There are two very good reasons why this should not happen (and, strangely, neither of them are that the EU is the spawn of Satan).
1) The EU is not a single currency area. The perceptive will note that the UK still has the pound: meaning, among other things, that there is no unity of interest on such matters as exchange rates, something which the IMF is charged with monitoring/dealing with. One seat would therefore not represent the still potentially divergent interests.
2) You don\’t actually get an IMF seat because you\’re big and important. You get an IMF seat because you\’ve coughed up the money to buy one. We have coughed up such dosh and thus we have a seat. If we\’re not to have a seta then we should get our money back…..
Ditto UN Security Council.
I don’t think there’s any suggestion that countries will pay less than their voting share, the idea is that Europe’s share (32.7%) is too high to be justified and as countries such as China increase their share by definition others’ have to fall.
You are right it is our money – Denis Healey used to make this point when idiots talked about ‘cap in hand’ – but I’m not quite sure why we would “get it back”, that seems to misunderstand how the Fund works.
“There are two very good reasons why this should not happen (and, strangely, neither of them are that the EU is the spawn of Satan).”
So, that’s three very good reasons then…